I am sure it has been said before but I will say it again. Why not move the magma totem to earth call it land slide or cave in or big rocks land here and no one will bitch about not being able to drop the 41 pt talent raid spot granting totem.
Hell let us throw the damn thing like a yard dart. Give rock barrage a targeting circle for epic win!
Or even better call it the stoning totem.

This is a little Off Topic for the direction this thread was headding, but Im new and I cant create my own thread just yet and a little lost on where to post my question.

Has anyone figured out the new hit cap for Elemental Shamans (sorry if this is a repost, Im at work and haven't had time to explore every thread just yet)

One of my guildies was in Naxx the other night and found that the old hit cap (52 @ 70 I believe it was) wasn't cutting it in Naxx, he said he eventually gemmed to cap out at 343 hit rating. (1% from heroic presence included) so I was wondering based on the 1% from heroic presence is the 343 hit rating actually needed to raid pve content efficiantly or is the number actually lower/higher

More to the point, should we be gemming for hit now or should we be gemming the way we had been gemming?

work in progress

343 is to much, if you raid with a shadow priest, but hit is our best stat until cap.

yea thats what I had initially thought myself, Im no mathmetitian (at least not at the caliber of the respected members that post here) but I had figured going into WOTLK that with the loss of hit talents from resto we would be capping somewhere around 160 (lvl 70) i didn't notice myself missing even after patch 3.0.1 released at the old hit cap (52) so I kept it there.

So Im guessing at lvl 80 (takes more rating/% i think) we would be somewhere between 160-220 (extremely rough estimate no mathematical evidence to back those numbers)

and by your reply Im guessing nobody has figured out what the hit cap is. (assuming no +hit buffs from other classes b/c thats not always dependable)

I believe 288 is the new "magic number" for hit cap, assuming you have a Shadow Priest/Moonkin (this does not include Heroic Presence, fuck Draenei racials). Hit is the most valuable stat until you reach the cap, so going forward I'm going to stick pure hit gems in yellow sockets, hit/SP in red sockets and stam/SP in blue sockets assuming the socket bonuses are worthwhile. I've enchanted my gloves with spellpower instead of hit because once I have more socket options I should be able to use gems to reach the cap; I'm not really sure that's the best decision.

Detailed FAQ on various ratings can be found at
[FAQ]Working theories of raiding at level 80


specifically

- 17% (446 hit rating) for spell casting classes. All + hit talents lower this cap by 26 hit rating for every 1% chance.

more detail at
Shaman: Enhancement

This is what I had worked out for myself for hit, but I'm a draenei so add 26.32 to each score if you're horde. Feel free to correct my math if it's wrong or if I have the wrong spell hit value per percent at 80.

Hit rating:
1% @ 80 = 26.32 hit rating

talents: 3% = 78.96
racial: 1% = 26.32
total: 4% = 105.28

5 mans: 6% - 157.92 (2% - 52.64)
raids: 17% - 447.44 (13% - 342.16)
+sp/bk: 14% - 368.48 (10% - 263.20)

Required Spell hit:

5 man instances: 53
10/25 man raids: 342
+sp/boomkin: 263

Regarding gems, for items with blue sockets that have a reasonable socket bonus, there are also hit/stam and hit/mp5 green gems. I would favor the hit/stam to help counter raid-wide damage, since mana doesn't seem to be an issue so far from my experience.

I really REALLY dislike the budget of our T7 glovesd due to the MP5 put on them, however they are very nice for swapping out for 10/25 man bosses when enchanted with 20 hit, gemmed with a yellow 20 hit, which would make them a whopping 88 +hit item. I'm going for the Crit/Haste/Spellpower gloves from thadius for everything but bosses.

I still don't think anything other than pure spellpower gems are worth gemming into blue slots when hit capped and you already have your best 2 bonuses gemmed with a blue for your skyflare.

Stam on blue gems is really not going to make or break any encounters for our class in PVE.

Whoops...when I edited my first post, I accidently removed the statement along the lines of "if you're scrambling to get to the hit cap". I agree with gemming for pure spellpower in blue sockets (when hit capped), though, unless the socket bonus happens to be spellpower, which would make an sp/stam purple a possible option to consider.

Bleh, I was pushing buttons fast and forgot to cap it :p Just put one more point from US to EP.

I wouldn't really sweat our AoE damage. AoE is a pretty small niche and its ably filled ATM by Mages and Warlocks. Our single-target damage is pretty miserable and at the point where you're bringing a class just for its static non-scaling buffs and joking all the while about how that player may as well drop ToW and go AFK, some changes are needed. We'll see how the Elemental changes change things; personally I'm not too optimistic that a little extra LB and LvB scaling on top of all the nerfs to which they've been subjected in the past will make the difference we want.

I think a major problem in terms of scaling, aside from spell power coefficients, is that 2 major stats that inevitably are all over our gear, crit and haste, do not effect 30% of our dps.

For aoe, I know personally when I saw the initial changes to ToW I instantly thought, this totem is going to be a nice little boost for aoe situations for our dps. Honestly I don't see why ToW can't be moved to earth.

I just had an epiphany: Lava Burst is itself a microcosm of the problems Elemental Shamans face. It's fast and bursty and extremely powerful at low gear levels where a guaranteed crit with high base damage is great. But it scales terribly, since its short cast time, cooldown and guaranteed crit make SP, haste rating and crit rating useless (or close to it). But yes, Elevn, that's a great way of putting it.

It would make it effectively useless in fights that need Tremor totem or in pvp, where earth school is basically our main defensive school (no offense, but having 280 extra spellpower here and there actually kicks ass in pvp). ToW in fire school makes more sense, but sadly blocks active totems and diminishes the relative power of those attack abilities. There's no perfect solution, I'm afraid, but if I had to pick between fire and earth for ToW, I'd pick fire.

I guess the problem I have with ToW being a fire totem is that based on the numbers that magma totem is going to put out for AoE its going to be better than ToW, but in quantifying magma totem's contribution to raid dps you have to subtract the benefit you'd be getting from ToW, so its going to shine in 5 and 10 mans, but in 25 mans its going to be minor.

For the scaling problem, it is inherently linked to itemization, by definition we can't utilize the stats on the gear available to us effectively. Aside from the aforementioned haste/crit problems, we have access to tons of mp5 through either gear (including t7 gloves) or Int through US and no way to convert it to damage like a viable mana dump (see LB CL ^ break even post above) or a straight fel armor-like conversion.

The other dps caster spec which gets very little value from crit and int/their "regen" stat, spirit is frost mages, who rely heavily on trinket like 2-3 minute cooldowns. In PvE our 3 minute cooldown is a relic from pre-2.1 that allows us to effectively remove that 45% chance we have to not crit and ~300 mana cost from 2 spells per average fight.

The fix that we are getting is going to be artificially inflating LvB + LB spell power coefficients a la BC. Raising spell power's value raises all the other dps stats relative value like it did before, but now it's throttled by the lava burst mechanics and its going to make spell power far and away our best stat. What lava burst's mechanics do allow it to do is scale really well with is critical strike damage multipliers (CSD, 4p T7). If only critical strike bonus damage was a stat we could effectively stack...

I disagree. Plenty of classes choose to minimize "regen" stats while gearing, specifically because they don't contribute anything to damage unless you'd otherwise run out of mana (almost never the case in a raid environment). I don't think we're unique in that respect. Yes, there's an unfortunate surplus of mp5 and dearth of hit rating on Elemental gear. Blizzard should really pick which items are DPS and which are healing, avoiding the current problem where there are a ton of similarly-itemized mail pieces that nobody is particularly excited about.

This is a good point, and expanding your view you'll notice that all our "signature" talents in the Elemental tree are novelties, and nothing really changes our playstyle the way other classes' signature talents do. Our 21-point talent is a passive crit damage increase. Our 31-point talent is, as you mention, useless in a PvE context. The 41-point talent is a totem that occupies our Fire slot, which is ironic because several of the talents we spec into boost the damage of the Fire totems we never ever use due to ToW. Still, it's functionally a passive buff. The 51-point talent is a novelty as well, giving a single-shot AoE nuke with a mana return but a long cooldown. Just consider this: in the overwhelming majority of PvE encounters, I don't even touch Elemental Mastery or Thunderstorm, and the other "signature" talents are passive. In no way do any of our premier/marquee/signature talents change our playstyles or fundamentally alter our capabilities. This is just poor talent design IMO, and frankly it will take too much dev time to meaningfully change.

I'm in total agreement. The fact that we scale better with spell power than any other stat, despite all the nerfs to our spell coefficients, shows that Lava Burst mechanics are flawed. Everything we do is structured around the Lava Burst cooldown, which makes haste rating scale poorly because haste matters only to the extent that you can squeeze in extra nukes between Lava Bursts. Crit scales decently but it's ultimately hamstrung by the fact that, as others have mentioned, 25-30% of our damage does not scale at all with crit.

I have no idea how to improve/fix the Elemental tree's signature talents, but I had an idea this morning in the shower (where all great thinking is done). What if Lava Burst was changed such that it no longer had a hard cooldown? What if there was a talent deep in Elemental where every Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning cast granted a "charge?" When you reach a sufficient number of charges (say 4-5 charges to make Lava Burst have a pretty similar cooldown at low gear levels to non-Elemental specs) Lava Burst's cooldown is automatically refreshed. This allows Lava Burst to scale with haste rating, which would go a long way towards making haste not only desirable but easy to work with. The downside is that it pushes Elemental into a purely reactive playstyle and basically forces players to use Chain Lightning every single cooldown whether or not they're engaging multiple targets (this is already the case, frankly, but Blizzard may not be too happy with forcing players to do this fairly counter-intuitive thing). The implementation of Hot Streak for Fire Mages shows that they're open to this sort of thing. But I think a change like this would go a long way towards helping Elemental scaling and damage. Because let's face it, our problem is not just scaling. In the grand scheme of WOTLK we're just at the start of the gear curve and we're already dead last. Things will only go south from here if big changes aren't made, and I don't think Shamanism is enough.

I have found one combination, using both Elemental Mastery and Thunderstorm together!

It can be an effective aoe nuke, I generally pop my +SD trinket, EM, TS (can be macro'd I believe)
I have broken 10k (not to each target) with an instacast in this manner and my gear is mostly L70 epics/L76+ blues.

In 5/10mans TS is extremely effective in clearing the tank for 2-3+ precious seconds (allows the healer time to cast a greater heal w/o any incoming tank damage, or a druid's HoTs to catch-up)

I will be the last person to tell anyone that our Talent tree does not need work, but I have tried my hardest to make it work for me.

I am a sucker for punishment, therefore I roll as a Shammie!

Thunderstorm is actually pretty useful in 5-mans just because it reduces your need to drink and the damage is meaningful in the kinds of AoE situations you find in 5-mans. We're talking about raid damage here, because honestly 5-mans are trivial. Every single heroic will get steamrolled by a competent group with reasonable composition/gear.

P.S. It's worth mentioning that Thunderstorm isn't even usable in most raid AoE situations, because the knockback makes tanks scream at you. Apparently there are plans to stick in a minor glyph that removes the knockback in exchange for a shorter cooldown, and it cracks me up that we need a nerf to our 51-point talent to make it even situationally good.

Just a piece of semi-useless info: LB is ~ 69% of our damage, Lava burst 23%, with flame shock being the rest of it (assuming a CL free rotation). There's 28% of damage that isn't affected by crit at all

There's gonna have to be some more changes, I like Ghando's idea but it doesn't even have to be that elegant, even if haste rating shortened the 8 second cooldown it would make us scale with haste.

I do wish we scaled better with crit rating as we do bring 8% crit to a raid and not get very much benefit out of it. My morning shower idea was have critical strike chance contribute to critical strike bonus damage via talent. But regardless of what happens, its good to know that, there are going to be additional changes coming.

And 31% that is only effected by haste to an extremely limited degree.